Stories

Recently I heard a song entitled 'The Story' on Grey's Anatomy (YouTube it if you like, I highly recommend it, especially when sung by Sara Ramirez) and the lyrics really struck a chord (excuse the musical pun) with me from just a few lines:
'All of these lines across my face, tell you the story of who I am. So many stories of where I've been and how I got to where I am' and, later on:
'You see the smile that's on my mouth, it's hiding the worlds that don't come out,and all of our friends who think that I'm blessed, they don't know my head is a mess.'
If not just for the wonderful way that they were sung, those lyrics really resonated with me and I began to think about their meaning for me.

The first line that I quoted reminded me of a time when I felt very self conscious, more so than I do now. I can recall constantly feeling exposed and hating myself, looking in the mirror and wanting anything but what I saw staring back at me and I can remember my heart pounding, both out of fear and nerves, when I looked at myself one day and saw that on my sides I had purple lines; purple lines that had gotten drastically bigger since I'd last looked. I'd seen them on my sister when she was pregnant, I knew that they were stretch marks and, for me, it was the defining point in my life where I went into overdrive with losing weight. Through overly restrictive eating plans, exhausting exercise programmes and whatever weight-loss tricks I could research, out of pure fear not to look at those marks again I worked myself to insane extents (I'd have one small meal a day, exercise non-stop for 5 hours and do an hour in the morning before school) to the point where I did have the kind of body that I'd dreamt of having for so long.

One day I was out with my Mum and she bought me a jacket, one that was meant to be tight fitting and when I wore it for the first time I felt nervous of what people might say to me- it was certainly different to anything else I'd worn before- but all I got were surprised reactions of people that were, literally, amazed at the weight I'd lost. Inside, though, I still felt like that scared person that needed to lose weight, so that's what I kept on doing. My parents and my form tutor (separate occasions) had both sat me down and said they thought I had a problem, though I didn't believe I did. From my point of view, I was perfectly justified to lose weight given how I thought I looked. Eventually, I stopped pushing myself to lose weight like I was doing, though, when I look back I still don't properly recall what it was that made me or helped me to stop. Lately, I'm not sure if it's a problem that's completely gone but, when I heard that line in The Story it made me think for a while about this whole thing.

The 'lines across my face' are the stretch marks on my body and, as I've shown above, just those marks alone 'tell you the story of who I am [...] and how I got to where I am' and, for me, it's a very personal story that made me relate to the second quoted set of lyrics I posted. Despite the happiness that people saw in me, the smile that I had when they complimented me on how much weight I'd lost, in my head I was always thinking that I could be better, I should be better, that what I was right now was still wrong. For a very long time, no-one knew how I felt or how strong my desire to change myself was, though I'm just glad in the end that some people did notice and said something to me...I may have been less than gracious at the time about it, but the help of people around you is something that I've come to appreciate greatly in life because not everyone gives it, unfortunately.

The lines on my body, although are now clear and no longer purple, will always be there as a reminder to me; a reminder of what I can do to myself (both with weight gain and loss), the emotional things I went through, the events that happened but, most importantly, they're a part of me that tells a story... one story of the many that I'll come to have in my life.